


we lived through scars this time

by backtohogwarts



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, June escapes, The rape tag is only there to be cautious, nothing like that takes place in the course of the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-11-02 13:42:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20766365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backtohogwarts/pseuds/backtohogwarts
Summary: As the wheels and the rotor turn faster and faster, June can do little but cling to whatever she thinks might be attached to the body of the aircraft and pray.  Unable to cradle her baby the way she wants to as they shoot down the runway, she pulls her knees up towards her chest as the bare minimum protection she can offer her child.Please.  Please.  It’s all she can think.  She can’t go back to that house; to Fred’s creepy stares and outright sexual violence, and Serena’s mercurial temperament and insane mind games.The wheels leave the tarmac and she and the driver who’d shown up at the last minute slide to the back of the hold.  It’s not a relief.They’ve still so far to go.An Alternate Universe in which June's escape attempt succeeds.





	we lived through scars this time

_we lived through scars this time_  
_but I've made up my mind_  
_ we can't leave us behind anymore_

** _Scars, James Bay_ **

* * *

As the wheels and the rotor turn faster and faster, June can do little but cling to whatever she thinks might be attached to the body of the aircraft and pray. Unable to cradle her baby the way she wants to as they shoot down the runway, she pulls her knees up towards her chest as the bare minimum protection she can offer her child.

_Please. Please._ It’s all she can think. She can’t go back to that house; to Fred’s creepy stares and outright sexual violence, and Serena’s mercurial temperament and insane mind games.

The wheels leave the tarmac and she and the driver who’d shown up at the last minute slide to the back of the hold. It’s not a relief. They’ve still so far to go.

She’s two weeks shy of four months pregnant and showing already, and it’s impossible not to think about the consequences to both herself and her unborn child if this attempt at an escape doesn’t work. Aunt Lydia was very clear about those consequences awaiting her should she be anything less than a _good girl_; and attempting to escape Gilead and taking “the Waterford’s” child with her seems like exactly the sort of thing she was talking about.

She’ll be chained up until the baby’s born, and then she’ll be executed.

The Aunt’s and the Eye’s will never leave her alone for even a second, never mind for long enough for her to make a second attempt at escaping.

She will be chained up for the next five to six months, she will labor and give birth in those chains, the motherfuckers will rip her baby out of her arms the second they’ve cut the umbilical cord, and then they’ll execute her, leaving her baby alone with the Waterford’s.

Well.

Alone, but for her father.

She tries to imagine Nick; so stoic and so sweet at the same time, forced to watch the Waterford’s claim their child. She likes to think that he would work as hard to get him or her out of Gilead as he has to get June herself out – as hard as he says he’s working to get Hannah out, too. She’d like to think that. But grief does funny things to people, and she’s seen it time and time again since being taken captive here. Moira, back broken and eyes haunted in red lingerie at Jezebels. Rita, so scared of everything that one could be forgiven for thinking she believes their captors propaganda too. Janine, maimed for standing up for herself once and then so desperate to escape her life and protect her daughter that she’d nearly killed her in the process. Emily, the bravest, strongest person June has ever met driven surely to madness by their uniquely evil “solution” to her “problem”.

June herself, and all the handmaids, who in their previous lives would have argued with you to the death if you’d told them that they’d one day lie down and be raped monthly at a minimum, just to keep the peace. Just to try and keep things from getting worse.

As if things aren’t bad enough already.

What if, in Nick’s grief, he turns his back on their child?

The aircraft jolts in the air, and she gasps, one hand gripping the netting around them harder whilst the other flies to her belly.

Enough.

It does her no good to worry about a hypothetical future in which she’s caught. It won’t help her, or change the outcome.

“How long left?” The driver, who’s name she’s glad to have already forgotten, calls out to the pilot over the discordant roars of the wind and the engine keeping them aloft.

“Not long now,” The pilot yells back, “Someone will be waiting for you when we land.”

She wants to call back and ask him who but she doesn’t bother. It’s not like it matters. She’s been shuffled around between all these different hiding places, at the mercy of so many people in Mayday’s network, what’s one more?

“Who?” The driver asks nervously, “If we land soon won’t we barely be inside the Canadian border-”

“Listen, kid!” The pilot interrupts, turning back and forth between sentences, “I’m getting you across the border. That’s it. You should be fuckin’ grateful for that much!”

“Thank you!” June shouts before the driver can say anything else, holding eye contact with him the whole time, and, miracle of miracles, he stops arguing.

Other than Nick, it’s the first time a man has listened to an instruction she’s given or even implied in over three years.

The shock of it’s almost worn off by the time the wheels touch the ground.

“Out you get, kids.” The pilot says, moments later, and despite herself she suddenly wants to ask him a million questions, make him prove they’ve really crossed the border and are now beyond Gilead’s reach. Before she can open her mouth to do just that, the pilot is pulling himself up out of the cockpit and shouting at them to hurry up over his shoulder.

A moment later, the door she’d crawled through back in hell opens and she finds herself almost breathless with the need to be out of this tiny space and outside. She scrambles to get through the door first and stumbles out onto the ground, dizzied with relief.

They really made it across the border.

She’s safe, the baby is safe, and they’ve both now crossed that tiny, enormous demarcation line that makes up the border, putting them officially out of the Waterford’s reach.

* * *

_“Just go with them," _He’d said, his mouth at her ear, one hand at her waist and the other spread over her lower stomach. Three tiny points of contact that may be the last touches they ever share. The last time he ever touches their baby, who won’t even be born for the better part of a year, should it survive at all.

The last time he ever touches _her_.

She doesn’t even know it. He can’t tell her anything else, can’t run the risk of anything going wrong, but should everything go right she could be free from Gilead in anything from a matter of hours to a matter of months. No one could give him a better timeline than that.

The uncertainty of it’s killing him, and that he’s not the one personally getting her to safety is even worse. He’s being forced to trust the safety of the woman he loves, and the child she’s carrying, to the hands of strangers. At this point, they still won’t even say where they’re going to take her. He’d nearly called the whole thing off, figuring he’d just have to find another way to get her out, when one of the other eyes had told him about the incident in the park with Janine.

His blood had flooded with a newly familiar mix of panic and pride.

So strong, his June, so tough and unbowed.

He would never wish her to be different, he loves her just as she is, but _Goddamn_; his blood pressure would probably be lower if she weren’t constantly living on the cusp of starting a revolution.

Given the timing, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to assume that it had been her announcement of a positive pregnancy test that had been the deciding factor in his getting her out of Gilead.

It also wouldn’t be correct.

He’s been working on a vague plan, then a less vague plan, and a back-up plan, and back up plans for his back up plans since that night when she’d run out of the house and seen him watching her from the steps. In earnest since that day in the kitchen when she’d slyly requested that Rita buy Tuna for the household meal.

_Funny, clever girl_, he’d thought to himself as she’d smirked at him from underneath her wings, _if you don’t break soon they’re going to kill you_.

He’d had so many potential plans and so few ways to execute any of them that a few days later he’d joined the resistance.

He’s still not sure what that makes him, exactly. A triple agent?

Betraying Commander Waterford however you cut it, certainly, but then the brute never did have his loyalty.

Not that the evil motherfucker deserves any better. That guy doesn’t deserve better than being drip-fed gasoline and set on fire.

His strongest plan had been to enter the Commander’s home late at night, kill both of the Waterfords, have himself and June change into some of their clothes, leave in his car, get Hannah, get out.

It had holes, and a hundred different possibilities for errors, and mistakes, and death by torture.

It’s that reality and the sheer frustration that came with it that had inspired him to tell her, driving back from the Putnam’s with the knowledge she was about to be interrogated by the Eyes, that everybody breaks. That you can’t change anything, so don’t try.

He’d felt so hopeless, even as the thoughts had flown through his head that all he’d have to do to avoid the interrogation would be to turn left instead of right when they reached the Waterford’s street. It hadn’t been that simple of course, they’d have undoubtedly been caught and tortured within the hour at best. It would only have made things worse.

It hadn’t stopped him from fantasizing about it though.

No. He hadn’t smuggled her out because of the baby. But once he’d found out that she was pregnant, he’d known immediately she was in more danger than ever before. He loves his child though he’s yet to meet them, would and will do whatever it takes to keep them safe, but it’s the mother of his child he won’t live without. It’s her he’s risking everything to protect.

As soon as he’s told what June has done – that she’s stood up to Lydia and by all accounts got the handmaids on the cusp of rebellion – any thoughts of waiting, of agreeing to an escape plan only if he can control it, are out of the question. He reaches out to his Mayday contact, another Eye he’s met only a handful of times, and sets everything in motion.

The guy contacts an Aunt on the spot and instructs her both that June is pregnant, and that she must hold onto that information until first thing in the morning, unless it would save June’s life to reveal it.

Then he contacts a fellow eye, stationed as security at the doctor’s office where June will soon be taken, who will make first contact with her, and gives him instructions on when to set up June’s escape route, whatever that means.

“You understand you’re not going with her, right?” The guy says with unflinching eye contact, “I can’t get you out at the same time, not without putting her in twice as much danger.”

“I know. But she has to know it’s me,” Nick says, “She doesn’t trust anyone.”

“No.”

“Listen, I’m not- I’m not trying to go with her. Swear to God, I won’t even try.” He can hear it in his own voice; the plea, but he can’t seem to stop it. Can’t hide his desperation. “You know just as well as I do what the Commanders do to these women. She doesn’t trust anyone, she won’t- there’s no way she’s going to follow some guy if she doesn’t know it’s something I set up. And I can’t tell her before it happens, the risk of- I need to see her, once, after they take her but before she’s gone, you understand?”

The guy just looks at him like he’s the dumbest man alive – but he does tell him where to go.

It’s eighteen hours after he asks for her trust in her room, and watches the eyes take her despite the Waterford’s orders to the contrary, that he drives the Waterford’s to the doctor’s office to watch June get an ultrasound.

That wait is the longest of his life, and sitting there in that waiting room he’s struck with the absurd parallel image – sitting outside in the waiting room whilst the mother of his child sits in the doctors office getting a scan to make sure everything’s alright. It’s so mid-century. He should be smoking a pipe and reading the broadsheets.

Eventually, the Waterford’s step back out; joy and relief all over their faces. God, he wants to fucking kill the both of them. The security guard steps out a moment later, lingering as he closes the door for just long enough that Nick knows it’s happening. She has her first instruction.

His heart pounds so hard it makes his stomach hurt.

He crosses the room to his boss, who looks immediately away from his wife, his face shuttered of all emotion.

“Offred is dressing, the Eyes will bring her. Get the car.”

“Yes, Sir,” he answers without hesitation, even as the thought of leaving her here unprotected and driving away riots in his head. In another life he’d have said he deserved an Oscar for his performance on the drive home, and when they get there too. He puts his hands at ten and two, locks his eyes straight ahead, and doesn’t move either.

He tells himself she’ll be alright on a loop, over and over again, as they pull in and he opens first the Commander’s door and then Mrs Waterford’s.

It doesn’t take long for things to begin to unravel.

By rights, the Eyes should be pulling into the drive with June no more than a maximum of two or three minutes after them.

It's barely been five when Serena catches his arm, snagging the fabric of his jacket to stop him in his tracks and then digging her fingers into his arm to keep him there.

“If you know something about this-”

“They could be stuck in traffic,” He interrupts her for the first time in his entire employment.

"Don't!" Serena cuts him off right back, "As if it's ever that simple with her!"

So this time he lets some of his fear bleed through his stoic mask, “You think I want her out there on the run? Now?”

Serena’s eyes search his face, and must be satisfied with what they find because instead of continuing to question him she checks their immediate surroundings and, finding them still alone for the moment, she leans in closer anyway to hiss right in his face: “Idiot.”

She lets go of his arm and spins around to stalk away, “You think I don’t know you’ve been sneaking around?” She searches for an appropriately derogatory word and settles on, “Fornicating. In _my house_. Don’t you forget, I saw you yesterday! I saw you, _kneeling _at her feet like a dog.” She bites at him, “You forget, Nick, that is not your baby. It is not her baby. It’s _mine._ She has _kidnapped my child_.”

Mentally, Nick cannot help but think of his original plan, of how cathartic it might have been to sneak in here in the middle of the night and kill both of these evil, rapist, war criminals.

Frankly, given half the chance he still might.

But not yet. Not until she’s safe.

* * *

The last time he sees her at The Globe, when she agrees to go without Hannah if she has to, he promises her that he’ll see her on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, when he gets there, she’s gone.

Not only her but everything she’d left there, too. Her memorial in the printing room, her timeline in the meeting room, her cluster of things cobbled together from the desks and the gym locker room in one of the smaller private offices. It’s all gone, and so is she.

He goes to his knees and then falls further until his face is pressed against the old gray carpet.

He would know if the Eyes had found her. He would know if she’d been dragged back to a red centre.

He knows, intellectually, that they wouldn’t have bothered to clean up after her if they’d been the ones to find her.

The evidence – or lack thereof – should be comforting.

It isn’t.

It’s two weeks to the day later that two handmaids walking by the gate at the foot of the drive slow their steps enough to catch his attention.

_Mayday_, one of them mouths, her lips moving only enough that he can just about catch that she was trying to say anything at all.

It happens quickly: whoever she is, she stumbles a half step, and then falls forward in a dead faint. Her shopping partner leaps away from her instead of towards, rushing the gates and screaming as though trying to get his attention, despite the fact that she already has it.

They’re putting on a show, he realizes.

He plays his part without hesitation, dropping the bottle of anti-freeze he’d been using to top up the car and running to the gate, “Get help,” he tells her, even as she’s already running screaming up the street for the Felton’s. One of them must work for them he supposes, not that it matters.

He goes to his knees beside the handmaid on the ground and leans over her as if listening for breathing, his fingers pressed to her neck like he’s searching for a pulse.

“Your daughter likes maple syrup,” The woman tells him without moving or opening her eyes, “They’re waiting for the other half of their family. She doesn’t want you to miss all the fun.”

His other hand falls to the concrete over her head to catch himself before he collapses over her.

She made it to Canada.

She made it to Canada, and the baby is a girl, and they both made it.

She wants him to join her.

Once he’s got Hannah out, she wants him to leave and join her, before the baby’s born if he can.

“Thank you,” He whispers back, so relieved he can barely breathe.

He can hear rapid footfalls on the road ahead and pushes himself back up; still on his knees but upright.

“She’s alright,” He says, halfway to himself and still amazed, barely paying attention as a Martha pushes him to the side to get to the handmaid on the ground.

* * *

Getting to Hannah is easier than he’d anticipated in the end, if only because he finally accepts that he’s going to join June on the outside. Both of the Eyes and the Aunt who initially helped him to get June out agree to help when he says he’ll do the truly dangerous part: attempting to sneak a child that isn’t his across a national border into another country isn’t just a crime in Gilead after all.

It’s the papers that take the longest. He’s not going to risk crossing in secret in the middle of nowhere with a child in the middle of winter – if they have car trouble, or the GPS dies or either one of them gets sick or injured, things will spiral out of control more quickly than he’ll be able to do anything about it. He’ll be honest about who Hannah is and who he is once they’re safely in Canada, but he has to actually cross the border with her first.

When they finally get them to him, pressed inside a hollowed-out book, it’s been just shy of seven months since she ran from the doctor’s office, and almost five since he last saw her.

The pieces of the Commander’s uniform have been arriving in pieces for the last three weeks, squirrelled away in every hiding place he could find in his studio.

As of two days ago and despite his urging to the contrary in his reports to the Eyes, the Waterford’s have been assigned a new handmaid “just in case” June cannot be located.

He has managed to avoid Serena getting him alone for the last forty-eight hours, but he’s all too aware of what awaits him if he stays any longer. She will ask him again, and he absolutely cannot do that. Not again, not with June and their baby girl and Hannah all waiting for him to put things back together again. There is no more waiting for the perfect moment. He has no choice. He must go, now.

There has been only one more message in all this time, and it didn’t even tell him anything about June or their baby. It was a tiny piece of paper, no bigger than a business card in the old world, sat unassumingly on the inside of his boot one morning when he’d woken up. Its location makes him wonder if Rita, or perhaps the new handmaid, has joined Mayday too. He has no way of knowing. There are only three letters written there.

_YYZ_.

Six months or a year ago he would have had no idea what that meant, but thanks to all the research he did in trying his best to get them out, he knows that ‘YYZ’ is the airport code to Toronto International Pearson Airport.

That’s where they’re going then, where June already is.

He destroys it immediately.

After dark, he waits until he sees the light go out in the Commander’s office, and then he forces himself to wait an hour after that, just to be sure, just like he always used to when he was visiting June at the Globe.

He changes his clothes and catches sight of his reflection in the glass of his shower door.

_Commander Nick Osborne_. That’s what Mayday had written on his papers.

It makes him want to laugh, and cry, and something in between, that they’re getting him out by giving him her name. There’s some sort of poetic irony in it, he’s sure, had he the mind for such things.

The papers list Hannah as his daughter. There’s a passport for both of them, a birth certificate for her. Visas, also for both of them. A completed, signed and stamped order from Commander Fred Waterford, ordering him, as a special envoy, to show Canada the best example of the childhood educational opportunities on offer in Gilead.

He slips them all into his inside jacket pocket, checks that the coast is clear, and then heads out on his way.

The journey passes in the moment in excruciating detail, every sound amplified, every ounce of tension ratcheted up as high as it will go, but in his memories, as mere flashes:

Backing the car out of the drive without turning on the engine for fear of disturbing anyone.

Pulling into the centre where Hannah’s being kept and praying that no one is in the wrong place at the right time and recognizes him.

Meeting in person, finally, the Aunt who helped him to get June out.

Meeting in person, finally, Hannah Osborne _née _Bankole. She’s asleep at the time, but something unwinds in his chest and tightens in his shoulders when he does. It’s both a relief to have her with him at last, and a terror to shoulder such a responsibility. The stakes have risen.

The Aunt pressing the keys to their new car into his hands, “May God bless you and keep you,” she murmurs fervently to him, “And God bless the child.”

Two hundred and twenty-one miles covered on what used to be Highway 91 over the course of three and a half hours, Hannah hidden from the checkpoints for the first hour where they know him as guardian-nick, not Commander Osborne.

Moving Hannah as carefully as he can from the trunk into the front passenger seat at the first chance he gets.

Waiting, waiting, waiting, whilst the Gileadic soldiers at the border comb through both his documents and his car. He’s not sure he’s ever held anything as tightly as he holds Hannah when they ask him to get out so they can conduct a “proper” search.

_“You understand how this looks,” One of the guards says to him._

_“You think I give a shit how it looks? I’m under orders from Waterford. Unless you want to call him and wake him up at three in the morning so he can tell you again what he wrote in that letter.” Nick answers, masking his terror beneath bluster and irritation._

_“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” The guy answers, distrust written all over his face._

_Another guard joins them, he’s officially outnumbered. The new guy scans over the paperwork._

_“Osborne,” He says, shoving his hand out between them with a taut smile on his face, “It’s been fucking years, how’s your wife – June, wasn’t it?”_

And so they cross the border.

It had never occurred to him that Mayday was this large – in numbers or in reach, but here they are.

It’s another six or seven hours on from the border crossing point at Stanstead, and he doesn’t want to get caught here dressed like a Commander, not when a fellow refugee – which is what he is now, he supposes – might see him and try for some vigilante justice.

The Aunt had put bags in the trunk, window dressing for the border agents. One is just for show but it does contain a couple of blankets to fill it out. The other contains pajamas and spare clothes for them both. He can’t take the chance of anyone seeing him like this, not even by running into a gas station bathroom to change. He changes instead on the back seat, as quickly as he can, and then takes off only Hannah’s top two layers – her cloak and her pink dress, leaving her in the long t-shirt and underwear all the girls wear over their actual underwear as part of their uniform – and he puts on the pajamas over the top.

He could have told the truth about their identities to that first Canadian border agent as soon as they’d left Gilead, but they’d have been separated immediately and he’s not about to lose track of her again.

Hannah, waking up as they pass through Kingston and not saying a word.

_“Do you remember your Mom?” He asks her as she looks at him with June’s eyes, “From before?”_

_She nods._

_“I’m a friend of hers,” He tells her haltingly, “I’m taking you to her.”_

_She nods again and then looks away from him._

_He tries to imagine her as the rambunctious kid that June had described but like this, he can’t. He hopes their ‘children must be seen and not heard’ bullshit hasn’t infected her too deeply._

_“Hey,” he says gently, and she looks up at him again, “We’re not in Gilead anymore. We crossed the border into Canada last night while you were sleeping.”_

_She blinks, a tiny crease appearing between her eyes as her brows pull together._

_“You’re safe now.” He promises her._

With any luck, they all are.

* * *

Looking down at her tiny, brand new baby girl asleep in the tank, blissfully unaware of how impossible her own existence is, June feels an amplified mirror of how she’d felt when Hannah was born – somehow, simultaneously, so complete and so empty.

Before the baby was born she’d tried, time and time again, to get Mayday to give Nick messages letting him know that they’re both still alright, but they’d refused. It was too dangerous, they’d said. In Gilead everything is a risk, so every extra risk had to be worth it to the cause. She’d hated it even as she understood their reasoning.

The most they’d allowed had been to confirm she was in Toronto, that was it.

She wonders where he is, if he’s alright, if he’s still trying to get Hannah out the way he’d promised to try to all those months ago. For the hundredth time that day, her hand goes up to her ear, to the missing lump of cartilage that she’d cut away the night she’d escaped from the Waterford’s in order to remove her red tag.

She blinks and a cascade of tears falls down her face, her fingers falling to grip the edge of Holly’s tank. Could be the hormones, could be the grief. Could be the love.

The past seven months have been the strangest of her life – back to reality, like waking up from a nightmare she still can’t believe was real.

After they’d landed on Canadian soil, they’d been picked up and driven an hour or so further into the country and taken to the American embassy in Montreal. That was the last time she saw that driver, who’d appeared out of the darkness on the runway, and she’s rarely thought of him since. The process had been quick at first, until she’d told them she’d been a handmaid for the Waterford’s. _Okay, _the woman filling out her intake form had said, suddenly more interested in her than she had been, _I’m gonna be right back. I’m just gonna go get my supervisor, okay?_

A supervisor, another, then she’d found herself face to face with Montreal’s American Ambassador to Canada herself. There’s more than one of them now, they tell her, to keep up with all the crises Gilead have caused. As soon as she’s given them the basic layout of her time in Gilead, the woman nods at her, familiarity in her eyes.

“Okay, June,” she’d said, “We’re going to talk about this more fully, make sure you’re properly debriefed, but that can wait. I bet you’re desperate for a shower.”

“Yes,” She’d said, suddenly able to think of nothing better in the entire world, “That would- yes, please.”

“You go get cleaned up, and by the time you’re done the doctor will be here to check you and the baby over, and hopefully you’ll still have time to sleep some before your emergency contacts get here in the morning.”

“My- I didn’t-”

“All the refugees here have lists of people registered with every embassy in the world. If anyone on that list shows up at any of them, they’re contacted. You’re on the lists of…a Luke Bankole and a Moira Burton?”

The debriefing had taken weeks after the three of them got back to Toronto. She’d been interviewed so many times, by so many different people, it feels like there’s not a soul on planet Earth who doesn’t know her story.

It had been hard to be honest with everyone, but she couldn’t have lied if she’d wanted to.

As soon as she’d started reliving all the things she’d been through, she’d found herself having the most extreme nightmares and many of them featuring Nick: Nick caught, Nick tortured, Nick sent to the front or to the colonies.

She’s staying in a little hotel room courtesy of what remains of the US Government, much to Luke’s dismay, and Moira is spending most nights with her.

The screaming is hard to ignore.

So she tells Moira everything too, despite the disapproval she knows is coming for her. As predicted, Moira spends two days trying to convince her she’s got Stockholm Syndrome, and even when she stops trying June knows it’s not because she’s accepted that she’s wrong.

“Don’t tell Luke,” Moira says one evening, apropos of nothing when they’re sitting on the hotel roof looking out over the city, “It’s gonna be hard enough to find your balance with him without him knowing- y’know,” she sweeps her hand out in front of her, “People who weren’t in there don’t get it. He won’t understand.”

June stares at the sun sinking slowly over the horizon until it hurts her eyes.

“Things aren’t going to go back to normal,” she says with her eyes closed.

“Of course not, how could they? I just mean-”

“I know what you meant. I’m not sure you know what I mean, though.” June cuts in before Moira can start talking about her marriage again. “I knew. I knew Luke was alive.”

The words sit between them like a strange animal, though credit to her Moira doesn’t outwardly react.

“Remember when the Mexican trade delegation visited?” She says, knowing that Moira will, that that must have been a tough few days at Jezebels, “One of them knew who I really was. Knew Luke’s name. He told me then. I knew all that time.”

Moira is quiet beside her for a long moment. June doesn’t add anything else.

“Well, fuck.” Moira says finally, and June almost laughs.

In her belly, the baby moves and her hand goes to the place where, were they any bigger, she’d be able to feel the nudges from the outside.

“I can’t make plans,” June says, “Not when he’s still stuck in there with Hannah, but I-“ she stops, images from her nightmares swirling ominously behind her eyelids, “I miss him,” she admits, and before she knows it she’s sobbing like a lunatic, clinging to Moira like someone’s trying to separate them again.

So, of course, she had told Luke. What other choice did she have? Once the debriefing was done he’d wanted her to move in with him and Moira and Erin. He’d wanted things to go back to normal.

They’d talked about it, and argued about it and screamed about it, and somewhere between the second and third drink he’d poured whilst she watched covetously, he’d made a flippant joke about the irony of losing the woman he left his wife for to another man. She knows him well enough to know he doesn’t mean it how it sounds, but all the same the words suck all the fight out of her, all the energy, and she sinks heavily onto the sofa he’s still sleeping on.

“I wish it was that simple.” She says tiredly, holding the image in her mind of the oasis they’d made of Nick’s studio over the garage, “I wish-” she almost laughs, but barely manages a huff of air, “I wish the last four years had never happened and I was sitting here confessing to some boring, clichéd affair. And it’s funny because that’s how I thought of it in the beginning. That I was cheating on you, even though you were dead. And then you weren’t dead and I still couldn’t stop. I told myself I just wanted the distraction but somewhere in there I realized I was risking everything for him, and he for me, and we still couldn’t stop. We tried, you know? But we couldn’t stop.”

Luke sinks down beside her on the sofa with equal heaviness, a deep sigh, and his eyes in his drink. “Yeah,” he says, with a lump in his throat, “I know.” He swallows hard. “Believe me, I know.”

The months pass, and the baby grows, and there are no messages from Nick. No sign of him either, or Hannah. In sleep, most often she’s ripped apart by nightmares. In wakefulness, she’s haunted by what could be. She’s not actually sure which is worse.

But that was then and this is now; June, alone, in a hospital room, with a baby. With her baby, with Nick’s baby. With Hannah’s little sister. And now, she knows she’ll suffer through those nightmares every day for the rest of her life if only she can keep her hopes close; if only she’s allowed to keep hold of those moments when she can so clearly imagine what life would be like waking up and going to sleep with him in their own bed, bickering about who gets up with the baby, and dropping off Hannah for alternate weekends with Luke.

She can remember that day in the maids-kitchen with such clarity, the day she’d told him she was pregnant and he’d gone to his knees at her side, that it’s almost easy to picture him here at her side, holding his daughter as carefully as though she’s made of spun sugar.

A knock at the door startles her, and she turns as one of the nurses steps halfway into the room. “There’s someone here to see you,” She says, “Would you mind heading down to the nurse's station? Don’t worry, I’ll watch the baby.”

June hesitates a moment, but only one.

The thing about hope is that it in her experience, it rarely shows up when it’s convenient.

It’s hard to step out of the room and leave a stranger with her baby, but in this moment what choice does she have? No matter how unlikely it is, if there’s any chance he’s made it, any chance this is him, she has to go and see for herself.

When she was in Gilead, always on the cusp of punishment, hope felt like power. It felt like an untouchable tiger, living, growling, behind her ribs, ready to strike if she needed it. Here on the outside, beyond the reach of the Waterford’s and the Eyes and the Aunts, hope feels like a ledge. Every step she walks with her baby behind her and the unknown ahead feels like she’s walking straight for the edge of a cliff with no way to know what’s waiting for her: a drop or a bridge.

Her eyes fall first on the nurse's station, and she opens her mouth to ask about her visitor, but movement in the corner of her eye catches her attention and she turns.

There, in a long-sleeved gray t-shirt and jeans, he is.

And oh, the mad, manic relief. Who knows who moves first, not that it matters. She’s never held onto anyone so tightly is the important part: she clings to Nick and he clings back. Someone’s sobbing; it’s probably her. But she can feel wetness at her neck and she thinks that maybe he’s not so stoic as he always tries to seem.

There’s only one thing he could say to make the moment any better, and perhaps because the universe realizes that it owes her on a scale hitherto unknown to man, he says it:

“I brought Hannah.”

She can’t even speak, how could she? She can barely breathe.

“Luke’s with her,” he says, reassuring her even now, “Mayday told me where-”

And there it is, all the information she needs. Everyone’s okay, everything’s fine.

And Nick, Nick is here. With her. With Holly.

So she pushes up onto her toes and cuts him off with her lips, with her heart beating so fast it feels like it might never slow down. He keeps one arm wrapped around her waist and lets the other sink into her hair, drinking her in in the breaks of the kiss.

“Are you okay?” He asks, and the smile that lights up her face is breathtaking.

She nods, whispers, “Yeah, I’m okay,” and lets her eyes sink from his for a moment. When they come back up they’re brighter than before. “Do you wanna meet your daughter?” she asks.

His breath shakes, and he pitches forwards to tuck his face into her neck. He’s holding her so tightly when he nods into her neck that he knows that she knows how scared he is. How desperate he is for everything to be okay now. How guilty he feels for missing the duration of her pregnancy, for missing the birth of their child. How exhausted he is, having spent the last eight months living in a state of overarching panic about her safety and getting Hannah out whilst the Waterford’s and everyone else in that hell hole watched his every move.

A small, short exhale, almost a laugh skims his ear. She sinks back down onto her heels so she can see his face, lets her arms unwind from his shoulders so she can rest them gently at his neck and keep him looking at her. Her grin is so wide, her joy contagious through it. “She has your eyes,” she tells him.

And so he follows her the short walk back to her hospital room, their arms still wrapped around one another.

And then, there she is.

Their daughter. Right in front of him.

A dread-locked nurse is holding her and smiles at them when they enter, a question passing across her face though she doesn’t ask it.

“This is Nick,” June says anyway, “He’s her father.”

“Congratulations,” the nurse says to him, and he can only nod as June walks forwards to take the baby carefully into her arms.

“Did the tests come back yet?” June asks her, but Nick can barely hear her or anything else for that matter. All he can focus on is the little bundle of pale pink blankets, the little white hat poking out the top.

“Should be a few more hours, but if I get them sooner I’ll come straight to you.”

“Thank you,” June says with a smile that sits more carefully on her face than a glass at the very edge of a high shelf.

“If you have any worries,” the nurse reminds her, fingers skimming the edge of the red emergency button on the wall a couple of feet from the baby’s tank. June nods, and the nurse takes her leave, leaving the three of them finally together.

June turns to face him, her eyes on the baby, and he goes towards them unable to stay away even a moment longer. He doesn’t try to take the baby and hold her himself, instead he wraps an arm around June so the baby lies between them.

“What’s her name?” He whispers, blinking furiously to stop her tiny perfect face from blurring.

“If it- I want-”

“Whatever you want,” he tells her quickly, looking back up at June.

She swallows, “Holly,” she says after a moment, “After my Mom.”

He nods jerkily and lets his gaze fall back down to her. To _Holly_.

“Holly,” he murmurs, stroking the tip of his finger over her little round cheek, and as though she’s heard him and understood, her eyes open slowly.

To see her now, it’s almost impossible to believe how things could have been. This moment, had it have happened at all, might be happening in the Waterford’s nursery during a snatched moment in the middle of the night. Here, they have all day and all the days.

All those moments ago when he’d first learned of her existence, when he’d knelt down at June’s side utterly knocked off his feet and humbled by the reality that their love had made a life, he’d imagined this: that his weeks of planning would pay off and he’d get her, them, out, and follow when he could with Hannah if he couldn’t get them all out at the same time. It wasn’t so simple. It still isn’t: he knows they’re going to want to question him further about how exactly he had access to get Hannah out soon and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that should Gilead fall he might face criminal charges for his role in the Eyes. But in this moment, he lands squarely between not caring about any of it, and feeling that it doesn’t matter – this is what he fought for all this time. His family, here, safe, together.

**Author's Note:**

> To be honest, I love some of the moments on this show, but I had to stop watching when the whole Nick/Eden sex scene happened because it was literally a bridge too far for me. Like, the idea that JUNE would encourage a man to "sleep with" an underage girl and continue to care about him, that the audience would be expected to hold him separate from the other men of Gilead because he's not like those other evil rapists guys!! He's a special rapist because he's the main love interest :) don't worry about it :) was too much for me. So, honestly, I just went back and wrote a happy (or at least happier) ending that sidesteps the whole thing, and that's what this is.


End file.
